As we mentioned in our coverage of Wednesday evening’s launch, the Places data is read only for now. Applications can’t write or search Places data through the API. Those features are only available to Facebook’s launch partners for Places — Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and Booyah — while the kinks get ironed out. Everyone will get access to write and search Places data within a few months, according to Facebook.

So sayeth the man page: “Every check-in is associated with a check-in ID that represents an object in the graph. Check-ins are associated with locations represented by Facebook Pages; the location must have a Facebook Page ID, whether the Page was created on Facebook directly or using the Open Graph protocol.”

If you don’t want to join in any of Facebook’s check-in reindeer games, the How-To Wiki has instructions on disabling Places in your account.